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Approaches to Arabic Name Transliteration and Matching

About this paper

This paper discusses a hybrid approach to transliterating and matching Arabic names, as implemented in a knowledge base (KB) used by data management software systems. The approach to transliteration relies on a lexicon of names with their corresponding transliterations as its primary method, and falls back on Perl regular expression rules to transliterate any names that do not exist in the lexicon. Transliteration in the KB is bidirectional; the technology transliterates Arabic names written in the Arabic script to the Latin script, and transliterates Arabic names written in the Latin script to Arabic. Arabic name matching takes a similar approach and relies on a lexicon of Arabic names and their corresponding transliterations, falling back on phonetic transliteration rules to transliterate names into the Latin script. All names are ultimately rendered in the Latin script before matching

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